The legal operations technology market landscape is highly volatile as large technology platform vendors vie with more traditional siloed specialist legal solutions to address the needs of legal leaders, according to Gartner, Inc. With increasing workloads and thinly spread resources impacting department productivity, legal leaders are turning to technology to improve their efficiency.

“Two major trends are emerging: first, legal tech buyers are giving more attention to collaboration, workflow/automation, and internal work/service management capabilities,” said Chris Audet, vice president, research in the Gartner Legal Risk & Compliance Practice. “Second, there is increased competition between what have been fairly siloed specialty solutions in the past.”

Despite the complexity and heterogeneous nature of buyer requirements in this market, many legal operations technology offerings are seeking to provide holistic solutions that improve legal operations. While individual products rarely deliver sophisticated functionality across all departments’ use cases currently, a core set of capabilities are emerging (see Figure 1). 

“Although this integration of capabilities offers real promise, and arguably tangible benefits, most legal departments will still need more than a single solution,” said Audet. “As a result, determining which products to invest in, or even which product supports which workflow, has become increasingly difficult for legal and compliance leaders.”

Be a better buyer of corporate legal operations technology
Given the diverse marketplace and varied capabilities available, navigating and selecting the right solution is a challenge. Larger and established vendors host a breadth of sophisticated technology solutions, and new players offer capabilities such as AI and assisted analytics, document management and IP management.

“It’s important to have a plan before selecting a technology solution or solutions,” said Audet. “That means clearly understanding a legal department’s requirements, and how a technology solution would meet them.”

To help legal who are looking for technology solutions in this area, Gartner experts have four broad recommendations.

1. Determine overarching legal department priorities by aligning technology roadmaps and strategies with business objectives.
   
2. Conduct problem-discovery interviews with legal staff to identify their required capabilities and prioritize those needs in a business-outcome-driven technology strategy.
   
3. Identify the depth of integration required to implement a solution by collaborating with IT and other relevant business partners.
   
4. Assess whether the technology solutions to which the organization has narrowed its choices meet staff needs and comply with IT requirements by conducting vendor demos.

“Corporate legal ops technology solutions have the potential to alleviate the burden of increased legal workloads, however, many departments do not realize the desired results because they don’t adequately prepare for technology adoption,” said Audet. “No single product can support all operations. It may be necessary to invest in more than one vendor to get suitable support for critical workflows.”

Gartner clients can read more in Market Guide for Corporate Legal Operations Technology and Prepare to Be a Better Buyer of Corporate Legal Operations Technology Solutions.

About Gartner for Legal, Risk & Compliance Leaders
Gartner for Legal, Risk and Compliance Leaders provides expert guidance and tools to help leaders across legal, risk, audit and compliance departments more effectively manage an increasingly complex risk landscape and build next-generation functions. Additional information is available at d and gartner.com/en/legal-compliance. Follow news and updates on LinkedIn and Twitter. Visit the Gartner Legal and Compliance Newsroom for more information and insights.